“Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.”

“People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.”

“I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.”

“One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in onese...”

“That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.”

“Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed.”

“A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.”

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”

“[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.”